If he faints, he gets wine or rum, or is taken back to his ship to recover.
When his back is healed he goes out to get the rest of his sentence.
Very few ever live through it, or if they do it's only for a short time.
They'd better have taken the hangin' that was the alternative.

Even a corpse with its back bare of flesh to the bone has received the last lashes of a sentence, and was then buried in the mud of the shore with no religious ceremony.
"Mind you, there's many a man gets fifty lashes that don't deserve them.
There's many men in the fleet that's stirred to anger at ill-treatment, until now, in these days, the whole lot is ready to see the thing through--to see the thing through--by heaven and by hell!" The pockmarked face had taken on an almost ghastly fervour, until it looked like a distorted cartoon-vindictive, fanatical; but Dyck, on the edge of the river of tragedy, was not ready to lose himself in the stream of it.
As he looked round the ship he felt a stir of excitement like nothing he had ever known, though he had been brought up in a country where men were by nature revolutionists, and where the sword was as often outside as inside the scabbard.

There was something terrible in a shipboard agitation not to be found in a land-rising.

On land there were a thousand miles of open country, with woods and houses, caves and cliffs, to which men could flee for hiding; and the danger of rebellion was less dominant.

At sea, a rebellion was like some beastly struggle in one room, beyond the walls of which was everlasting nothingness.